About

In the summer of 1956 a small group of men spent two months at a college in New Hampshire. They had written a proposal saying that every feature of intelligence could, in principle, be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate it. They gave the thing a name. Then the summer ended and they went home. For a long time after that, the machines could play checkers and prove a few theorems, and not much else. Money came and went. Twice the field went quiet for years, and people who had worked on it found other things to do. Somewhere a few of them kept at it anyway, in the way you keep a plant alive on a windowsill without expecting much.

What changed was not one idea but several that arrived out of order. A method for pushing error backward through layers of arithmetic, which had been known and then forgotten and then known again. Graphics cards, built for video games, that turned out to be good at multiplying large tables of numbers. A million labeled photographs, collected by people who were mostly paid very little. In 2012 a network trained on those photographs did something no one had quite expected, and after that it was clear which direction the road went. Machines learned to translate, then to see, then to describe what they saw. In 2017 a paper proposed a way for a model to look at every word in a sentence at once. A few years later the models were writing paragraphs. Then they were writing code. Each step looked ordinary from close up.

Around this time something else happened, quieter. People who had trained as physicists or mathematicians or programmers, people who had jobs, began to feel that the interesting questions were being asked somewhere specific, by a few hundred researchers in a few buildings. They read the papers on the train. They ran small experiments at night. They wanted to be in the room, or at least in a room nearby. Not for the money, though the money was real. They wanted to work on the problem itself, while the problem was still open. It is hard to explain this to someone who does not feel it. It is a little like wanting to see the ocean before you die.

This is a place for those people. The doors are listed here. What you do once you walk through one is up to you.